Food Waste Depackaging and the Need for Better Regulation

The food we eat often comes packaged, including in soft plastic bags or hard plastic containers. Depackagers are machines that are designed to mechanically separate food from the surrounding packaging. Today’s machines use various types of applied force to separate the packaging from the food waste, e.g., through a shearing action, a vertically oriented hammering action, horizontal or vertical pressure through a metal sieve or screen, or some combination thereof.

What results from depackaging is two streams: The first is a slurry of food, which can then be processed through anaerobic digestion or composting; the second is the removed packaging and other residue (from which some recyclable material, like metals, can theoretically be separated, but typically, this stream is destined for disposal in landfills or incinerators).

One significant advantage of depackaging is making it easier for more food waste generators to divert food waste from disposal through organics recycling. The best practice for food waste recycling has long been to manually separate the packaging from the food at the source (the location where it is generated). However, companies generating large amounts of packaged food and/or beverage waste may have limited means to separate the food from the packaging at the source. If these generators can use depackaging services, it is much easier for them to send that food to organics recycling facilities instead of disposing all the packaged food just because they lack the means to source-separate the food from the packaging.

Food waste generators should ensure that good food doesn’t go to waste and is rescued and redistributed for people to eat before recycling scraps through composting or AD. This requires sorting food away from recyclables and trash as early and as often as possible. Mechanical depackaging should not be the default treatment for all packaged and unpackaged food going to waste, especially if that food is easy to separate from the packaging at the source. The use of depackaging is growing for both compost facilities and large AD facilities. AD cannot be the only method used to recycle organics; it generally does not have the capability to break down yard waste, food-soiled paper, and similar types of organic materials, all of which are frequently mixed together in residential (and some commercial) organics collection. Source separation, which is when the generator separates food and sometimes other organics from other waste streams at the source, enables more food scraps to be composted, especially at smaller-scale facilities. And source separation enables the recycling of more packaging materials. The rapid scaling of depackaging—without corresponding standards for contamination measurement or end-product quality—creates uncertainty for composting facilities that depend on quality feedstock to maintain their markets.

Right now, we don’t know how much of the packaging materials processed through depackagers is ending up in the food stream (slurry) that comes out of depackagers. This is particularly a concern when it comes to microplastics—currently, no standardized measurement protocol exists to test for the presence of microplastics in depackaged food waste slurries nor in compost or digestate (the product of AD) made from depackaged food waste. That said, given what we know about how depackagers work and how easy it is for microplastics to shed from plastic, the potential for depackaging to increase microplastic contamination is significant.

Since there isn’t a clear way to measure microplastics, we also don’t know how much plastic is ending up in the soils where the finished compost or digestate is applied as a soil amendment. Plastic in soil potentially harms plants, animals, and humans; it can affect how water and nutrients are retained in soil, negatively impacting plant growth as well as creating human health concerns such as digestive, respiratory, and reproductive issues.

The goal of food waste diversion policies, and food waste reduction in general, is to keep more food out of landfills and incinerators—but we should not trade one environmental harm (methane and other pollution from disposal of food waste) for another that is potentially just as bad (polluting soils with plastic). Without more information on how much plastic is making it through the depackaging process, we risk doing just that.

There is a critical need for standard lab protocols for measuring microplastics in depackaged food slurries and, subsequently, in finished digestate or compost that uses the depackaged food slurry. Such protocols are usually developed by standards-setting bodies like ASTM International, trade associations like the U.S. Composting Council, or the federal government. Microplastics researchers at the University of Vermont and elsewhere have established their own measurement protocols, but they are too time- and labor-intensive to be widely adopted.

Once we have the ability to consistently measure microplastics in slurries (and finished compost/digestate), we need to decide what limits to set on microplastics in each of these streams and how to set them. Then regulations can be developed accordingly and applied consistently. Until then, the risk of increasing generation of microplastics from food waste depackaging remains unchecked. As a result, current regulatory oversight is inconsistent and not based on standard measurement protocols, and permitting of these facilities is likewise inconsistent.

NRDC worked with BioCycle to produce the report The State of Food Waste Depackaging Regulations in the U.S. in August 2026. BioCycle also published an article (“Depackaging Is Scaling Fast and Regulation Isn’t Keeping Up”) summarizing this research in April 2026.

The NRDC and BioCycle study showed that some states do regulate compost and digestate quality and use, relying on limits or other rules on physical contamination that may restrict the presence of microplastics to a small degree. The report includes examples of what different states are doing. Most often, these limits are set by percent contamination or particle size (for reference, plastic particles that measure 5 millimeters or less are considered microplastics). But without consistent measurement protocols, enforcement of these approaches tends to vary.

We need more data to understand where and how depackagers are operating and changing the food waste management landscape. While we await a standardized measurement protocol for microplastics that can inform consistent regulations, a practical near-term step is establishing basic permitting or notification requirements—similar to what North Carolina is implementing—so that depackaging operations can be tracked and, when testing requirements are established, readily brought into compliance. This would help track these operations, which is especially helpful if testing and/or measurement requirements need to be put in place, and it would also provide useful data on the amounts of food waste received, amounts recovered through depackaging, and amounts sent to anaerobic digestion and/or composting facilities. In addition, it would be useful to collect data on how the end products that contain depackaged food waste are used, e.g., through land application contracts with farmers or included in normal compost product sales.

As BioCycle put it: “Researchers, state regulators, and facility operators should use what tools they have at their disposal to track and understand how depackaging is changing the way food waste is managed and how to reduce the risk of knowingly adding microplastics to composts, digestates and, eventually, soils.

“While the organics recycling industry awaits a standardized measurement protocol that can be adopted nationwide, objectively analyzing contamination loads in food waste streams provides necessary documentation to inform best management practices.”